And Now The Magic Begins
When God opens doors that no one can shut.
Dearest new subscribers welcome! Thank you so much for trusting me with your reader’s gaze. Right now I am telling a long story in bite sized pieces. You’ll want to begin here. But if you’d like to read without having to know what’s going on in this story you can do that, too, by clicking for some humor or encouragement or the power of influence.
But I do encourage you to catch up - I promise the magic of it will be wildly worth it.
And Now The Magic Begins
September 4th of 2013, a mere four months after my move to Austin, I had a dream. (I know I know – please don’t tell the dream! It’s so boring to hear people’s dreams!) Remember my brazen prayer “Okay, God, show yourself”? I won’t say He had not before this moment. But now His answer would not only be a showing up but a showing off – and yet even the next events would be just the beginning.
God is always speaking and showing up. But we don’t, or won’t, hear. So sometimes he waits for us to fall asleep where we don’t, or won’t (or can’t) put up such a fight.
Throughout the years I had recurring dreams about Peter that he was always following me, and I was always trying to escape him in some way. (I do have journaled proof of all this.) But in recent years I’d noticed the dreams had taken a new turn. Now he wasn’t following me. Now he was simply standing on a corner. Waiting. To an outsider that might sound ominous or creepy, but this was far from the case. The prevailing fear that always accompanied the dream was gone. In fact, instead of adversary, he had become friend. And within a few more dreams, even a benevolent presence.
He was good. And it was good that he was there with me.
It confounded my awake self. I wrote in journals how I was confused by this change and chalked it up to my own psychological healing. Except I wasn’t focused on him at all. I wasn’t doing anything to instigate the dreams or the healing. It was non-starter. So…why?
Then just months before, I dreamed that we now were, indeed, friends. These series of dreams made a huge impression on me because I’d made a decision about him long ago that he was just “wrong”. Full stop. But something within – something other – was saying something wholly different.
And then on “this” day I had a Finale Dream in this foe-to-friend series about Peter that would turn the world right side up again:
I receive a phone call from him. I struggled to hear him on the other end. I heard him say something but couldn’t make it out. Then he said, as from the other end of a long dark narrowing tunnel , “You’ve always been in my heart.” Then there was a dead silence. Then, bright as the noon sun and with razor sharp clarity, I heard him say this:
“You are my soul.”
I woke up.
(This is the moment in movies where the dreamer suddenly wakes, eyes wide open with a small intake of breath and pushes herself upright, amazed, yet not quite out of the dream world.)
“You are my soul.”
The Texas sun shone brightly through my eastern facing window. The entire room illumed with the promise of the new day. My eyes softly gazed the diagonal orange and yellow ovals across the wall from a decorative hanging glass ornament refracting the morning glow. I awoke within the warm embrace of this sunlit kaleidoscope not fully letting me go, enfolding and holding me somewhere between the realms of heaven and earth.
God is a scenic designer.
I sat there in its stillness, or perhaps the stillness sat me, pausing me within the sphere of what I’d just beheld.
“You are my soul.”
I sat remembering with full certainty this avowal as something warm and full within, a presence, pulsating and revolving like smooth gliding hands of a clock right smack in the center of my chest. My solar plexus.
“You are my soul.”
And that was the moment I fell in love with Peter.
All over again.
That was the moment I was awakened from a long, long sleep. For none of this was my doing. I did not wake up.
God, the Prince, kissed me awake.
Warm. Whole. Pure. True. Love.
Just as Peter sat at the card table twenty-eight years before watching me steadfast in my love and in a moment fell in love with me. So I did that morning. A breaker had flipped. A fuse had been holy fixed. And the light was back on.
Some things happen just like that. Some things just are.
Then? I became alert. Aware. Earth had beckoned me back. I cannoned out of bed and ran for my boxes of stuff. Where is that sonnet?! Where is that card?! I couldn’t find it anywhere at first. I did find them a few excruciating days later (oh how the tide turns). And read them with the eyes of my heart.
I began by telling you it was September 4th.
The next day, on September 5th, I found out that Jerry, our beloved director, had died.
On September 6th, I scrambled and searched for Peter’s email.
On September 7th I did what, before the “You are my soul” dream, would have been unthinkable. I spent several hours writing a mere ten lines of email to him. (It seemed to me that not to do so would have been a real jerky thing considering how intertwined our past was with this director.)
And… “You are my soul”. And the timing. And the whole “love” thing.
I didn’t hear from him until October 13th. October THIRTEENTH. FIVE WEEKS LATER. The first two weeks I was obsessed. Then I slogged through the mind junk mail of how I was “getting what I deserved” and maybe I was “mistaken”, and “you are putting the cart waaaaay before the horse” – if there’s even a horse on the other end. Then realizing that considering I’d been the one who’d slammed the door shut for twenty-eight years, this open-ended minor delay (hopefully) was a small price to pay.
In my solar plexus I knew he’d respond. I knew it. So I calmed down and got on with life, still having to face the physical issues of, prominently, anemia and bloodsucking fibroids just beneath where love was re-blooming, and finding a miracle doctor with a musician’s insurance discount program.
Then October 13th arrived.
I opened my Facebook page and saw a friend request (a duplicate request that I’d ignored years before.)
My stomach plummeted to my very knees.
I clicked “ACCEEEEEPT!!!!!!!!!!”1 I immediately checked my email - and there. it. was.
“Omg only got your email just now…”
Love love love this!!!!!